No fewer than 1.6 billion people
— nearly a quarter of the world’s
population — depend on forests
for their livelihoods. Forests
are also critical to maintaining
biodiversity, mitigating
climate change and enabling
key ecosystem functions that
regulate the biosphere. And,
as the UN resolution declaring
2011 the International Year of
Forests recognized, managing
forests sustainably can contribute
significantly to sustainable
development, poverty eradication
and meeting the Millennium
Development Goals. And yet
about 45 per cent of the world’s
forests have already been cleared.

Building a sustainable tourism economy
around visiting forests is a powerful
way of witnessing and leveraging their
contributions If that sounds a little
trivial compared to the planetary
stakes of conserving the world’s
remaining forests then consider these
economic facts.

The global timber trade is worth over
US$150 billion a year. That money often
creates short-term, perverse incentives
— especially in developing nations — to
fell forests even though in the long run
countries are far stronger economically
when they manage them sustainably.

The value of forests is far higher than
the value of the timber trade. The total
value of the ecosystem services they
provide — such as carbon capture,
water filtration, soil fertility and pest
management — is estimated at
US$4.7 trillion annually. Forests
contain over half of the planet’s
biodiversity, on which around
40% of the world’s economy —
particularly agriculture, forestry and
pharmaceuticals — directly depends.
The value of forests, like the value of
survival, can’t be measured in money:
but if we compare them to human
economic activity, they couldn’t be
”worth” less than 20% of Gross World
Product, or at least US$15 trillion
— two orders of magnitude higher
than their timber.

Now consider the value of travel and
tourism, one of the world’s largest and
fastest growing industries. It generates
about US$6 trillion worldwide —
over 9% of Gross World Product
— and employs 235 million people.
It is especially important for the
economies of developing countries,
which house most of the world’s most
biodiverse forests. From 1990 to 2006,
international tourism revenues in
developing countries quintupled, from
US$43 billion to US$222 billion. Travel
and tourism globally has continued to
grow robustly through the economic downturn: by 2021, it
is forecast to generate
over 13% of GWP
or US$9.2 trillion,
employing one in ten
of the world’s workers.

Ecotourism is
estimated to be
growing three times
faster among leisure
travelers than the
overall industry: it of
course encompasses
forest-based tourism
— including travel to lodges that
own protected areas or to forestbased
communities that run tourism
operations, situated
near or within national
parks and biosphere
reserves. Though a
fraction of the total
market, the potential
economic value of
forests as tourist
destinations could
clearly exceed their
market value as timber
stocks, and would be
exploited much less
destructively and
more profitably. The
power of tourism
can generate massive
investments in
conservation that
carry a high rate
of return. Tourism
market values
are much more
commensurate with
a broader view of what forests are
“worth” (many trillions of dollars)
Tapping those values can preserve
forests’ biodiversity, ecosystems
services and other invaluable assets. USAID’s Forestry Team found that
nature-based tourism contributes to
forest protection “through heightened
awareness of biological resources and
the generation of alternative incomeproducing
opportunities.”

Of course, largescale
tourism can also
decimate ecosystems,
from coral reefs to
rainforests: so it’s
critically important
that it, like forestry, is
managed sustainably.
Forest Stewardship
Council (FSC)
certification has a huge,
positive impact on
forest management. So
far 334 million acres of
forestland — about 1%
of the Earth’s land area, roughly twice the
size Texas — are under FSC responsible
management (just under half of those
acres are certified by the
Rainforest Alliance). FSC
is growing rapidly, and
its sustainable practices
are deeply and rapidly
influencing industry
practice — including
selective harvesting of
lower volumes of wood,
replanting, providing
wide conservation areas,
preserving sensitive
ecosystems, protecting
the habitat of endangered
species and maintaining
carbon sequestration
to reduce carbon
emissions. It is the
gold standard for
environmentally and
socially responsible
forestry, helping
communities earn a
living by maintaining
healthy, productive forests.

Given the value of the tourism sector,
and the rapid growth of ecotourism, an
analogous system for sustainable tourism
could be a powerful tool in providing
communities with an additional way
to make a good living by keeping their
forests standing. Tourism is relatively
labor-intensive and can help reduce
poverty and increase economic equality for women, who make up 46% of the
tourism workforce, higher than the
global average. Tourism jobs offer
relatively high wages and have a jobcreating
multiplier effect. A new study
by the Center for Responsible Travel,
for example, found that workers in
ecolodges in Costa Rica’s Osa Peninsula
— which National Geographic calls
“the most biologically intense” place
on earth, but is also one the country’s
poorest regions, — earn twice as much
($710 a month) as workers in a range
of other fields. In Nicaragua, where
tourism focuses prominently on the
natural environment, the Rainforest
Alliance estimates that every job in
tourism creates an additional local job
in another sector, with a higher wage
than the national average.

For all these reasons, Rainforest
Alliance promotes sustainable tourism along with sustainable forestry and
agriculture. It helps tourist businesses
get up to speed by providing them with training and technical assistance, and
verifies compliance with sustainability
requirements, so they can achieve
sound accredited certifications. We
supported the launch of the Global
Sustainable Tourism Council (GSTC),
which advances universal principles and
criteria, connecting diverse businesses,
governments, UN bodies, research
and academic institutions, social and
environmental NGOs and certification
programs around the world. And we
launched the website SustainableTrip.
org, aggregating businesses that are
verified by independent, third-party
sustainable tourism certification
programs on a searchable database
where travellers can find sustainable
forest destinations.

Sustainable tourism certification is
still in its relatively early days, but it
has already demonstrated a potential
to tap the power of market forces and
the need for sustainable development
to create powerful incentives for
conserving forests.